Authors: Thomas Perry
Emily caught Sandy wincing and shaking her head. Emily said, “The police still have it. Phil was shot in his car.”
“Oh!” Dave said.
Sandy rose. “Emily, we’ve just got to go. As I said, please call me if you need anything.” She bent over, patted Emily’s shoulder, and headed for the door, not looking to see whether Dave was following.
Once a few guests had left the house, the others seemed to feel that they had been released. They began to move toward the door in numbers. If they felt any obligation to Phil Kramer, they seemed to feel that they had now discharged it; and if they felt any sympathy toward his widow, they judged that the kindest thing they could do for her was to give her a chance to rest.
When she was alone, she lay on her bed, and closed her eyes.
Suddenly she sat up. She couldn’t lie here like this. She had to do what she could to find out what had happened to Phil. She stepped out of her black dress, put on a pair of jeans and a pullover top, poured the contents of her small black purse into the one with the long shoulder strap that she used every day, and went down to the car. She could rest when it was her turn to be dead.
Emily was in the office sitting at Phil’s desk and examining files. She remembered Phil’s peculiar filing system from the old days when she’d worked with him. He kept the bottom drawer of each filing cabinet for guns and ammunition, on the theory that if he ever needed a firearm in a hurry he would already be ducking down low behind his steel desk. The top drawers were what he called “overhead” drawers: They contained bills and payment records for utilities, the building mortgage, the time sheets and payrolls. He kept them there just to give snoopers a sniff of something real, but useless. The next set of drawers were an odd assortment of ancient billing files interspersed with files that were fake-folders full of junk mail. By the time an interloper had gone this far, he would be too tired and exasperated to face the second row of drawers from the bottom, which looked just like all of the others, but which contained real case files, past and current.
Phil had been secretive.
Emily had examined the dozen most recent case files before she heard the sound of a key in the door of the outer office. She was ter-rifled. The killer must have known today was the day of the funeral. What did he want? It was too late to turn off the lights, so she ducked behind Phil’s desk, opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet behind her, and took out the gun Phil had left there. She heard the door rattle a little as she looked at the pistol frantically, found the safety, and switched it off. She put her eye to the side of the desk and watched as the door swung open.
Ray Hall walked into the office, looked around him, a puzzled expression on his face. He reached into his coat.
Emily called, “It’s me, Ray. Emily.” She got up from the floor, sat in Phil’s chair, and hid the gun in a lower desk drawer so he wouldn’t see it.
“Oh. You scared me. I was pretty sure we had left the lights off.”
“You had,” she said.
“Why aren’t you home?” He walked to the door of Phil’s office and stood there.
“Why aren’t you?”
“I’m meeting the others here. We talked at the funeral, and we thought we’d come in.” As he spoke, Dewey Burns and Billy Przwalski came in the door, stopped, and looked at Emily and Ray. A moment later, April Dougherty arrived.
They whispered to each other in the outer office, and then came to the door of Phil’s glass cubicle. Ray Hall stepped inside with Emily and the others crowded in after him.
She lifted the dozen case files out of the file drawer, set them on Phil’s desk, and said, “Thanks. I’m grateful to all of you for coming in.”
“We talked after the funeral, and we thought we might come in and see what we could do about collecting Phil’s things for you. We didn’t expect you to be here. But since you are, maybe we can finish the job today and close up the office.”
“Close up the office?” Emily said.
Ray shrugged. “Yes.”
“Thanks for your offer. You’ve all been really kind, and I know things look bad right now. At the moment I don’t have the money for this week’s paychecks, but I do intend to make everything right as soon as I can.”
“That’s okay,” Dewey Burns said. The others nodded, then stood where they were, looking uncomfortable.
“I can see you’re all waiting politely to hear me say thanks for everything, and good luck in your next job. That’s not why I came in today. I’m here to work.”
“What?” Dewey Burns said.
“I said I’m here to work.”
“Here?” Bill Przwalski said. “At the agency?”
“Phil’s gone, Emily,” Ray Hall said gently. “The agency is bankrupt.”
“I’m afraid I can’t just let it go at that, Ray. Phil not only cleaned out the agency’s accounts, but he also emptied our savings, let his life insurance go, and-as far as I can tell-cleared out whatever money he had set aside for retirement. I don’t know why he did. I don’t know why he was killed. But I find that all I’ve got left is this business. I’ve got to try to run it.”
Dewey Burns said, “You can’t run a detective agency without a license.”
“You and Ray both have licenses, and Billy’s halfway there.”
Ray Hall said, “Emily, this is probably not a great idea. It’s true that technically, the agency still exists, and since you’re Phil’s heir, you own it. But running it is a different story. It’s not an easy business, and with the bank accounts gone, the assets aren’t much-a few lastgeneration computers, some steel filing cabinets, and a reputation that depended on Phil’s credibility. You would probably be smarter to sell it.”
“I’m not completely ignorant,” she said. “I worked with Phil in the old days, when we started this agency. I’m not a detective, but I know how to run an office.”
Dewey Burns said, “When was the last time you worked?”
“I quit when I was seven months pregnant.”
The four attempted to conceal their skepticism. Ray Hall said, “That was what-twenty years ago?”
“I’m keeping the agency open. It’s not because ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to hunt down deliverymen who file fake disability claims. It’s because my husband’s dead and I still have to pay the mortgage. I would like it if the four of you would stay.”
April’s lips moved as she counted the others: one, two, three. There didn’t seem to be anybody else. “You mean me, too?”
The men watched Emily closely. “Of course I mean you, too,” she said.
“Oh.” April seemed unable to fathom how she got included. She was mired in thought.
Ray Hall said, “Emily, this isn’t a good idea. We still have no idea why Phil was murdered. It’s been a week, and the police don’t seem to have a theory, either. There’s no guarantee that whoever did it won’t try to kill someone else who works here. This could be more than unprofitable. It’s probably dangerous.”
“I told you, Ray. I don’t have any other choice. You’re right that this could be some psychotic who has a grudge against the agency, or it could be someone who hates the world and wants to kill everybody in it. I won’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to keep working here, but I would love it if you would stay. Anybody who doesn’t want to stay, please come back in a couple of weeks and we’ll see what I can do to pay what I owe you. At the moment, I just don’t have the money.”
Ray Hall said, “I was just giving you my best advice. If you want to try to keep the place going, then of course I’ll stay and try to help.”
“Right,” Dewey said. “Me, too.”
“I still need another year of hours for my license,” Bill said.
Emily moved past them to the outer office and set her stack of files on April’s desk. “April, if you’re staying, here’s something to do. These are all cases that are closed, and the client owes money. I want you to call them all, and here’s what I want you to say. Mr. Kramer has passed away and his heir is in negotiations to sell the agency. Since material produced in any investigation that hasn’t been paid for remains the property of the agency, the files will be included in any sale. If you can’t remember it exactly, write it down and read it to them.”
“But what if they pay?” April asked.
“Then the files belong to them. When their checks clear, we’ll FedEx them.” Emily turned and walked back toward Phil’s office.
April looked at the files doubtfully. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to look for more money we can collect. If I can scrape up enough, then you’ll all get a paycheck this week.” She stopped at the door to Phil’s office. “If the rest of you are staying, see about completing the ongoing investigations, so we can bill for them.”
Ray Hall hesitated, then sat at his desk and pulled a file out of his right-hand drawer.
“Not you, Ray. You just finished the Stevens case, right?”
“Almost. I just have to go show him what I’ve got and hand him the bill.”
“Do it tomorrow morning, and then I want to put you on a new case right away.”
“Who’s the client?”
“Me. I want you to find out who murdered Phil.”
Jerry Hobart had been in Las Vegas for five days now. He had told Tim Whitley to put the hotel bill on his credit card, and so, if Hobart wanted to, he could probably stay until Whitley’s card got maxed out. But he sensed it was time to move out of the Venetian.
Having a sense of how long things were supposed to last was important. Parties ended, and the last one to leave might get stuck explaining the mess. He unlocked the safes in both closets, collected his two hundred thousand dollars, and packed the money in his suitcase. He filled out the express-checkout form as Tim Whitley and told them to leave the charges on the credit card, then dropped it in the box on his way out of the hotel at eleven in the morning.
He was feeling better today than he had felt for months. He had gotten sick of Tim Whitley’s meaningless chatter and needed to put an end to it. Since he was a child in school, he had been amazed at the capacity some people had for being weak and annoying. If they weren’t stopped, their needs would expand gradually to require everything their imaginations could encompass, and their talk would amplify to smother all silence and make real thought and feeling impossible.
Hobart was aware that he couldn’t expect every person he met to be what he was. But he could expect them to carry their own weight and find ways to encourage and comfort themselves without making excessive demands on Jared Hobart. A man you were traveling with should be able to limit the amount of attention he needed to divert from the task at hand. He should be able to refrain from whining. He should be able to do what babies learned to do, which was to put themselves to sleep without talking long into the night to work their brains into exhaustion.
Leaving Tim Whitley under a pile of rocks in the desert had been the proper thing to do. Having two hundred thousand dollars was twice as good as having one hundred thousand, and Whitley’s lack of self-discipline had made him a risky partner. A man who couldn’t wait to tell stories about himself to impress a companion would never be able to resist telling somebody someday about killing Philip Kramer.
Hobart came out to the front of the hotel, gave the parking attendant his ticket, and went to stand in the waiting area across the driveway. He stood with his eyes closed and his muscles relaxed and savored the currents of hot desert air swirling in under the big canopy and touching his face and arms. He recognized the quiet engine of the Hyundai, opened his eyes, and watched the parking attendant setting his suitcase and Whitley’s in the trunk. He handed the young man ten dollars, got into the car, and drove out onto the Strip.
Hobart didn’t mind the traffic on the Strip. He was safe, well fed, rested, and he was in control of a vehicle with a full tank of gas. It was about the highest pinnacle that a creature on this planet could reach. The minor fillips and incentives that some people craved did not in terest him. Once a man had been in prison, his mind became receptive to small improvements in his physical well-being, but he could recognize the emptiness of status and the illusory nature of security.
Hobart drove the Strip like the others, invisible because his car didn’t excite envy and his driving didn’t stimulate fear, and because it was difficult to be here without staring at the fantastic buildings and the lighted signs. In fifteen minutes, he was south of town heading out Route 15 in the stream of cars that ran toward Los Angeles. He took the exit to Route 95 and headed due south through the desert. Here he found relief from the congestion.
The world was getting too crowded. When he was growing up near Cabazon, the big attraction for outsiders was the giant concrete dinosaur that looked down over the freeway that led to Palm Springs. Now the Indians had built a big, fancy hotel and casino, and there were two huge outlet malls. People seldom got the point. One dinosaur or one outlet mall were kind of interesting. Two or three of them next to each other in the middle of the desert was just freakish.
He took the back way along 95 through Needles and Blythe, skirting the Arizona border down to Interstate 10, and west through Palm Springs, Indio, and Cabazon. It was night when Hobart drove up into the hills above the freeway exit and stopped at a driveway into an asphalt rectangle about the size of a football field. There were rows of trailers lined up along the sides of the square two deep, and in places three deep. There was a set of power lines strung up on a row of poles stepping up the hill, and smaller lines off the poles for hookups to the trailers, so there was light in many of the windows. The barbecues smoking in all ends of the place gave it the look of an encampment, a caravan of people who had just arrived at sundown and would be leaving in the morning, but it wasn’t. Hobart’s girlfriend Valerie had lived here for at least twenty years.
Her parents, Connie and Ralph, had come to the desert out of irritation. They seemed to have lost their tolerance for brushing against people, until their nerves were like old wiring with plastic insulation that had worn and cracked open. They spent their days behaving as though they still lived in Los Angeles, the mother taking Valerie to school and then coming home to water the flowers in the pots on the asphalt beside the trailer. Her husband drove fifty miles to Palm Springs every day to work fixing cars. He had been an engineer in Los Angeles, and the job was easy for him. He never had to talk to the customers directly. Valerie’s parents could act that way, living in an imaginary place, but their daughter was in the world outside their heads. She went to school with the other desert kids, and spent her spare time walking the vast empty places with Jared Hobart.